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4 In Manhattan for the Great War When the United States entered the Great War in April 1917, every healthy male between the ages of twenty-one and thirty-one anticipated induction by autumn and then service in the field. The twentyeight -year-old Fleming didn’t appreciate the bump it would put in his career path; in what looks like an attempt to lower his chances of going in the first wave of draftees, he changed his birth year to 1888 on his draft card. But once he was called up, he didn’t flinch from the challenge . He wrote his mother in August that John Fairbanks arranged to have Fleming’s draft exam take place in Laramie, Wyoming, where he was shooting The Man from Painted Post. “Hope I pass it” was his comment . And he did. After he squeezed in one more Fairbanks picture, Reaching for the Moon, the Army inducted him “with what appeared to be the rest of Hollywood” on October 18. He arrived at Camp Lewis, outside Tacoma, Washington, on October 23. In a letter to his mother that night—“I have made up my bed and am going to hit it very soon”—his only complaint is about the crowding in the car on the way. “All the boys say it is great up here,” he adds, and “one can’t expect too much because things are so new up here they have not had time to get things running smooth.” His “first job in the army was to peel potatoes with a kitchen police detail at Camp Lewis,” Fleming wrote in Action. He was initially a private in the Ninety-first Division of the American Expeditionary Force, known as the Wild West Division because the bulk of its draftees came from California, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, Washington , and Wyoming. The Army dammed this flood of men into the division ’s 166th Depot Brigade before assigning them to units. According to Fleming, he “had enlisted in the Officers’ Training Corps”; unfortuSrag_9780375407482_3p_01_r2 .z.qxp 10/13/08 10:35 AM Page 55 nately, “before the commission came through, my number went up in the draft.” Had Fleming remained in the Ninety-first Division and the 316th Field Signal Battalion, he might have seen battle in France as a combat photographer. A few days after his arrival at Camp Lewis, Major Charles Wyman, the division signal officer for the battalion, summoned Fleming to his office. Wyman had received a telegram concerning Fleming’s enlistment , either from the War Department, as Fleming remembered it, or from the office of the chief signal officer. The way Fleming recounted the interview, Wyman told him, “We have about thirty-five hundred applications from the infantry for service in the Signal Corps. They all want to get into the photographic division. They all say they’re A-1 cameramen, or laboratory experts. What we want you to do, Fleming, is to get ten good men out of the bunch.” Fleming wrote that he “knew there weren’t that many cameramen and laboratory specialists in the country, but I kept my lips buttoned.” Wyman’s nephew Richard V. Wyman remarks that “Charley was not one to make up figures, and he might have said there were ‘a lot’ or ‘many’ from which to pick ten.” Wyman, perhaps unwittingly, had orchestrated an ideal match of job and soldier. After Fleming chose those men, he was transferred to Fort Sill, Oklahoma, and became a soldier in the 251st Aero Squadron and the Aviation Section of the Signal Corps, in part devoted to making “pictures from the air that would help the artillery locate its target.” (Eventually, the Army handed aerial photography from the Signal Corps to the newly formed Army Air Service. The Army Air Corps had temporarily disbanded in 1911.) Although the Signal Corps was founded in 1861 to take charge of all field communications, it had not kept up with technology and had trained its officers and soldiers mostly in semaphore flags and telegraphy . Still photographs had no place in the Signal Corps of the Civil War, and prior to World War I the Army used motion picture photography only for isolated events, like the Wright brothers’ flight in 1907 at Fort Myer, Virginia. But on July 21, 1917, it designated the Signal Corps “the bureau which will obtain the necessary photographs to form a comprehensive pictorial history” of the war. Fleming would become...

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